Surely Sleep and other doom bands relying on the slow chugging sound are only one flavor of heaviness? I suspect there’s a broader property at work of which Sleep’s style is one flavor. What about Meshuggah’s “Bleed”? It’s not the fastest song in the universe, although it’s surely faster than a Sleep track, and some of the heaviest parts of the song occur when it speeds up! What about the ending riff to Immortal’s “Pure Holocaust”? That riff will make you bang your head like no other, and it feels super heavy (heaviest moment on the album.) In Black Metal no less (or see 1349)! It would seem odd to not call Slayer super heavy when their riffs are frenetic, but heavy they are. What about “Raining Blood”? Or for a lesser appreciated song example, how about Strapping Young Lad’s “Critic”? That song is heavy as heck, and it’s wildly frenetic. Godflesh, considered to be one of the heaviest bands of all time, would be a better fit for your model, but even one of their heaviest feeling tracks like “Streetcleaner” is on the faster side relative to doom bands. Slowness is one tool for heaviness, but only one. Syncopation is another. Odd disjointed riff structures might be another (which you find a lot in death metal.) I’m convinced it’s something more like a formal or structural property of riffs (or stretches of music so we can fit in classical stuff), and it may have several species.

I’m not sure these observations run counter to your theory, but it was a worry I had, especially since you want to engage in something closer to ideal theorizing, but are doing so by using a single band/single genre style as the representative.

Yeah, I think that’s right. All of those are heavy (and great examples of heaviness). But I guess I want to say that those are more “intense” than “heavy.” Part of my concern is that heaviness has been too readily equated with intensity, even if those two often go hand in hand. But I think I would say that if you took, say, “Raining Blood,” and slowed it way down, downtuned the guitars, and then layered the tracks, you’d end up with something heavier.

intelligible SWS Run 2 − unintelligible SWS Run 2, corresponding to the intelligibility response post-reveal. Group differences could also be seen for this contrast, but would not directly establish or refute differences in spontaneous processing as participants had already been told about the existence of speech in the intelligible SWS.

These images were taken up to second-level random effects analyses for group inferences. Where group differences were observed, analyses were repeated controlling for any behavioural differences between the groups (i.e. a difference in recognition point) by including them as covariates in the second-level analyses. We also carried out exploratory individual differences analyses in SPM, to examine associations between neural responses and behavioural performance. All statistical maps were thresholded at
P <
0.001 peak-level uncorrected, cluster corrected with a family-wise error (FWE) at
P <
0.05 across the whole-brain. All co-ordinates are reported in MNI space. Anatomical labels are based on the SPM Anatomy toolbox (
Eickhoff
et al.
, 2005
) and the Human Motor Area Template (HMAT;
Mayka
et al.
, 2006
), with images produced using SPM and MRIcroGL. Parameter estimates were extracted for plotting using the MarsBaR toolbox (
Brett
et al.
, 2002
) with regions of interest based on the full cluster extent of activated regions in the above analyses. Between-groups comparison of behavioural data was analysed using two-tailed
t
-tests at
P
< 0.05, unless otherwise specified.

During the training phase, some participants described the sounds as being ‘a bit like a robot’ or ‘like the Clangers’, but no participants described either the target or unintelligible SWS sounds as being speech or voice-like. However, while being scanned, the majority of NCVH participants reported perceiving speech in the SWS stimuli before the mid-scan reveal, with one participant reporting hearing speech from the first ‘three or four words’ of Run 1. A significant difference was evident for the recognition point when participants reported first noticing words in the SWS: on average, the NCVH group heard them a block earlier than controls, as shown in
Fig. 1
D [mean
=
3.71 and 4.94 for NCVH and control participants, respectively;
t
(27) = −2.17,
P =
0.039]. [Due to non-normal data in the control group this comparison was also run using a permutation test in the
perm
package for R, producing similar results (mean difference = −1.23,
P =
0.041), Monte Carlo method used with 2000 replications.] Overall, 9/12 NCVH participants (75%) reported realizing that there were words present compared to only 8/17 controls (47%). Of these, seven NCVH and five control participants additionally mentioned that they could understand the words, with five in each group being able to accurately recall some of them.

During scanning, all participants remained awake and responsive to the target stimuli, as indicated by the button-press data. However, button-press responses for four participants (one participant with NCVH, three control subjects) did not record correctly and one NCVH participant accidentally pressed a button for every trial. There were no group differences in total button presses, whether or not the latter participant was included (all
t
< 1.4, all
P
> 0.19). Participants with irregular button-press data were marked and checked for their influence on group comparisons of functional MRI data (see below). Only one NCVH participant reported experiencing a hallucination during scanning (a visual hallucination, occurring midway through Run 2); however, they did not report this affecting their ability to complete the task.

Useful Links

Remember…

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
- Robert A. Heinlein, from
Time Enough for Love